Re: [Ayatana-dev] Searching for applications, keywords and synonyms

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2010-12-23 at 12:55 -0800, Dylan McCall wrote:
> Hi! I have a little itch to scratch :)
> 
> A while ago I sent a message off to Gnome Shell's mailing list on this
> topic, but there hasn't been much feedback yet. Still hoping to get
> the ball rolling, so… maybe we can start on this here!
> 
> It seems every new desktop shell promotes searching. In Unity, lots of
> features are built around search, so it is important that it works
> really well. Right now, the results for application search can be
> pretty erratic, making it only consistently useful for getting back to
> an application one already knows by name. It doesn't work for
> _discovering_ an application. For example, Unity as it is cannot
> reliably help someone wondering “how do I burn a music CD?”
> We can do way better than that.
> 
> Right now, in Maverick's Unity, a search checks an application's Name
> and Comment field. So, if an application wants to be search friendly,
> its developers have to cram as many relevant words as they possibly
> can into its one-sentence comment.
> If I search for “photo,” I get Cheese, F-Spot, GIMP and Shotwell (in
> that order).
> ”photos” gives me Cheese, F-Spot and Shotwell.
> “camera” gives me UFRaw.
> “photograph” gives me GIMP.
> “photography” gives me nothing.
> 
> I think a good solution to this problem involves the standard menu
> categories attached to the Desktop Menu Specification:
> http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/apa.html
> The nice thing with this is most applications already do what we want.
> Poking through /usr/share/applications, I can see most apps on my
> system already describe themselves with good, logical sets of
> additional categories, like "Game;Simulation",
> "GNOME;GTK;Graphics;Viewer;Publishing;" or
> "GNOME;GTK;AudioVideo;Audio;Recorder;"
> 
> All this needs is that those categories be searchable. Right now, they
> aren't, but it could be easy enough to create a centralized _thing_
> that links registered menu categories to natural keywords relating to
> them. So, the Photography category gets “photography, photograph,
> camera, image.” (Where we make an assumption that the search system
> does partial string matching).
> For particular cases, comments come back into play but have a less
> prominent role. Perhaps a Keywords field could be gradually phased in,
> but it would be less urgent.
> 
> There are probably too many variables here to do something
> particularly controlled like the card sorting exercise. I was thinking
> about setting up a quick web app for people to match applications with
> different keywords (and then to manually match those keywords with
> categories).
> Any suggestions for this? :)
> 
> As for the rest of this thought: yeah, that's what I think would work.
> I'm curious if we can establish some agreement on whether search
> _needs_ fixing and how to go about it.
> I would love to help with this where I can, particularly figuring out
> that data set (and its localisation logistics).
> It would be really nice to have something portable so we can still be
> consistent with how applications are presented in different desktop
> environments.
> 
> Bye!
> Dylan

Hi Dylan,

two initial changes, that would already get a lot of conceptual clutter
out of the way:
remove the middleman.

* once i click on something labelled "photos" or "music" in the dash,
present no apps, present the appropriate content instead, managed in the
DE's default management app for it.

* use a semantic approach to data organization, enabling semantic search
instead of sending out a string query.

since "Run Application" was not available when i needed it most (testing
Natty alpha), i installed Synapse as my main ALT+F2 dialog.
Clearly enough, Synapse would be an enormous step forward, compared to
the AIUI string-based search in Unity's Dash.
I find *everything* with Synapse, and if i don't i can ask it to search
the web for me..
That's comfortable!

So one way of making search easier, is keep your room clean and tidy,
give things a loical and natural order. Ontologies help with that, rich
metadata. If rich metadata is implemented for say 3 out of 5 most
popular media types, e.g. music, video and photo, the rarest case would
be a user looking for an actual filename or URI, it would rather be all
the way semantic search.